The Animal Smugglers

THE LOOTING and SMUGGLING and FENCING and HOARDING of IMPOSSIBLY PRECIOUS, FEATHERED and SCALY WILD THINGS

By Donovan Webster

Published: February 16, 1997

As the world's largest exotic reptile show -- the National Reptile

Breeders Expo -- was about to get under way last August in Orlando, Fla., special agents from the United States Fish and Wildlife Service's division of law enforcement were ready to move in. For more than three years, they had been tracking a fast-moving smuggling ring out of Germany and Canada, and two members of the ring had just arrived to sell more than $100,000 worth of rare and protected snakes and tortoises from Madagascar.

They spotted Simon David Harris at the Orlando airport. Harris, 25, was a British citizen living in South Africa. He was carrying in his suitcases 61 Madagascan tree boas and 4 spider tortoises, both of which are protected species. Customs officials arrested him. He would be the bait.

Two days later in a restaurant outside Orlando, Harris's partner, a 33-year-old German named Wolfgang Michael Kloe, was eating breakfast with his wife and two children, waiting for the remainder of his shipment to arrive. Harris showed up, but unbeknown to Kloe, he had agreed to cooperate with Federal officials. The two men left the restaurant to add Harris's cache to Kloe's, which was in a parked van nearby. Kloe had a haul of Madagascan boas; over the years, his ring had smuggled in more than 100 boas and 51 radiated tortoises, which since 1975 have been protected by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (Cites), signed by 130 nations. The radiated tortoise, indigenous only to southwestern Madagascar, has a yellow head and a domed shell with brilliant yellow-and-black star bursts, making it one of the most coveted tortoise species on earth.

As Kloe climbed into his van, two Fish and Wildlife officers confronted him. He went quietly -- until he got in the car.

''I handcuffed him with his hands in front instead of behind his back,'' one of the officers recalls. ''I thought it would be more comfortable during our ride.'' The officer drove Kloe toward Orlando for his arraignment. He slowed the car as they approached a tollbooth on the East-West Expressway, and then: ''Boom -- Kloe was out of the car and running.''

Kloe shot out across the 10-lane highway, dodging speeding cars and trucks. He jumped the railing of a bridge and scampered down an embankment before disappearing inside a plumbing-supply warehouse. With the sirens of backup police units blaring in the distance, Kloe slipped out a rear door, where a pair of warehouse workers grabbed him. They mistook him for a petty thief.

Kloe eventually pleaded guilty and was fined $10,000 and sentenced to 46 months in prison for conspiracy, smuggling, money laundering, attempted escape and violating the Lacey Act, which bans interstate and international transport of endangered or protected species that have been illegally captured. For Fish

and Wildlife, breaking up Kloe's ring was a result of thousands of agent-hours, including international detective work and audio- and videotaped stings. Why all this time, money and effort to stop the smuggling of ... a few dozen snakes and turtles from Madagascar?

Wildlife for sale. The trade in exotic animals -- especially protected, threatened and endangered species -- is not usually thought to occupy a huge share in the global market of illegal goods smuggled across borders. But in recent years, only illegal drugs have outstripped the cash value of the living and dead wildlife that sluices through a black market toward trophy hunters, pet enthusiasts and devotees of traditional medicines. ''The business is roughly equal to that of smuggled weapons,'' says Anne-Berry Wade, a Fish and Wildlife spokeswoman. ''And very few nations do anything about it.''

Between $10 billion and $20 billion in plants and animals were traded illegally around the world last year, with the United States leading the list of buyers -- spending about $3 billion (compared with $30 billion for contraband drugs). The cargo comes in many forms. Like the snakes and tortoises shipped to Orlando, they may be live ''pets,'' pulled from the wild to be sold for thousands of dollars to collectors. They might be dead animals or animal parts whose use and value spans every interest: rare butterflies and beetles caught and killed for collectors; potions made from the horns of endangered black rhinos or the bones of tigers, both of which are said in some cultures to increase male sexual potency, or exotic skins used in designer clothing (Most Wanted, page 30).

In the end, however, animal smuggling is essentially an environmental problem. According to Fish and Wildlife authorities and a chorus of independent biologists and ecologists, life on earth may be nearing a doorway it does not want to enter. They suggest that if the decimation of animal populations and their habitats continues, the tapestry of life across whole blotches of the map may start to unravel. Though few scientists agree on the timing or severity of this scenario, they have given it a name: ecosystem collapse.

Perhaps nowhere on earth have exotic animal species come under more pressure than on Madagascar, a 1,000-mile-long island off the southeast coast of Africa with the planet's most distinctive skein of life. Given that the high-profile arrests in Orlando last summer concerned some of Madagascar's most coveted tortoises and snakes, I decided to see firsthand what the animal trade looks like from the supply end, and what it does to an environment under attack. I boarded a jet for the 30-hour flight.